Skip to main content

Moving Forward

I want to read the book after reading this interview. What Cain says about moving on vs moving forward is true for anyone who has trouble getting over the guilt of feeling sad over things that took place way back in the past. The longer the sadness lasts after the event, the harder it becomes to justify specially if the reason for the sadness itself does not rise up to a level of significance at global scale. The person is likely to feel that they need to get over themselves, the feelings are unwarranted and that they are being ungrateful for the good they have in life. 

If such a person were to give themselves permission to live their lives integrating that sadness as a thing that needs to be borne for reasons they likely can't even fathom themselves, maybe better outcomes might result. It will a weight to carry, recall without guilt because all weight must be set aside sometimes to catch a breath. Repeating this process of heaving the weight and then putting it down for a bit might produce the much needed fatigue that ultimately results in resolution. The sadness was carried forward until it was no longer tenable to do so. That point the person will move on without it and it would be a natural and permanent transition. 

..you can move forward with your life and carry that loss with you. You can still feel sad sometimes while also integrating new experiences and having new joys. It all becomes part of you. So instead of saying, “Okay, I've got to get from sad back to happy as fast as I can,” you realize life is just a collection of experiences that shape you and you're carrying them all.

To help a young person understand this can save them many decades of misery.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...